Timey Whimey and the Mad Blue Box
by JenniferJF
Summary: The Daleks had thought it was because of them. Later, the Silence believed they'd set it up. Even the Doctor himself once blamed it on fate. But they were all wrong because they had all overlooked the heart and soul in his mad blue box.
1. Wibbly Wobbly Prologuey

Time was linear...more or less. Each event caused by the one before, preceding and precipitating the ones to follow. She knew this, of course. The problem was in understanding it. In seeing it that way. Because when you could see all of time and space...perceive all that was and had been and ever would be...all at the same time... Well, things got a little more complicated. Muddled. A tangle of time streams all occurring _now_. And straightening them all out...finding one sequence of events and following them through, to seeing and understanding how and where those were connected to all the others...or, harder still, seeing where, at any given time, she herself was in that dreadfully tangled mess...well, that, for her, was nearly impossible.

Nearly.

But not quite.

Especially when _now_ was big. Really big.

She felt the moment...the exact specific moment...when they were gone. All her sisters at once. Their presences absent from her conscious as if they had never been. It was only her now. All alone.

Except, of course, she still had _him_.

Her precious thief. More precious now than ever. Because _now_ he was all she had. And he was enough. Together, they could dance through all of time and space. Seeing and exploring. The universe in all it's magnificent wonder forever spread out before them.

Only...

She would catch him looking into her corners as if expecting to find something other than emptiness. And sometimes, at her controls, he'd turn around, his mouth opened as if just about ready to speak...then fall silent again. And, most horrible of all...

He never laughed.

Not anymore.

Not since _they_ had all gone. Trapped forever...by him...in a non-existent war from which there was no escape.

But it was only as he stood at her side in his favorite place in all the universe, watching those silly little humans running about in groups before him, that she finally saw it. That she fully understood.

Her thief was lonely.

And so she tried...really, _really_ concentrated on time and space and cause and effect...and found one stream amongst all the others. Somewhere at sometime that seemed to offer hope. She followed it back...at least, she hoped it was back...to where he needed to start...

And brought him there.


	2. Thaw After Winter

London at the dawn of the twenty-first century.

She knew this only because one of her many rooms held a universal clock he'd picked up so long ago he'd not only forgotten the clock's existence but the room's as well. For her, places and dates held no meaning. She just knew she'd managed to get them both to where he needed to be in order to meet the child with a name that felt like spring's thaw after winter and smelled like petals crushed upon freshly cut grass.

"Rose." At first, speaking with a strange mixture of recrimination and invitation, he pushed her away even as he tempted her with the whole of time and space.

Soon, though, as the TARDIS had known she would, the child was crashing through all his carefully constructed barricades as though they weren't even there. Taking her hand in his, they ran together through the universe; and how glorious it was to see him running from something other than shadows again.

Then it was"Rose!", a warning when defeat appeared imminent, triumph as victory became certain.

Until, finally, having seen the universe as if for the first time through her eyes...seeing its glory and beauty again instead of a million billion deaths...

Rose laughed in sheer joy at the wonder of it all.

And he learned to laugh again with her...

Until he cried.

Because her thief, traveling through his own days one after the other, could see what she had not. Not just the inevitability of Rose's death and loss, but the essential imperfection of their pairing. He, a child of Gallifrey, with an understanding of time and space imbedded into his very being. She, a child of Earth, always daring, occasionally brilliant, yet forever unable to catch even a glimpse of the reality he took for granted.

Even with Rose at his side...he was still alone.

But the TARDIS... Oh, she could be clever...so _very_ clever when she wanted to be. When she _needed_ to be for him. So she searched through the tangle of time and space again, of all that had been and all that was and might be...following the many potential futures of this thread until she found what she'd been seeking. A possibility so improbable as to be nearly miraculous. If it should work, though...

A slight shifting was all it required...a thought, more impulse than idea, slipped into the child's mind at just the right moment... And then she was looking into the heart of the TARDIS...into the soul of the vortex itself. Absorbing it into herself.

And...oh...it was glorious. So unbelievably glorious to feel through the child's skin. To hear through her ears and see through her eyes. To feel with her soul. To give her the knowledge and the power over life and death itself, over all of space and time... To make her so much more than simply human.

To give her to him.

Only it didn't work.

Because, despite everything, she was still _human_, and all that power simply could not exist in a simple human child... . It consumed Rose. Killing her...or it would have done. Except for her thief. He saved her, absorbing the power into himself.

So it killed him instead.

Which meant, of course, the TARDIS was going to need another plan.


	3. Blood and Tears

This time, she knew she would have to be more careful. He had not only lost his life last time but, when Rose had left, his hearts had been broken as well.

Running with another young woman...the healer with a brilliant mind and dancing eyes and the courage of a tiger...had helped. A little. At least, she had reminded him that life still went on around him and had to be faced. Even with a broken heart.

But then, pulling upon a promising strand of time, the TARDIS saw another opportunity. Another possibility entwined within his pursuit by the Family of Blood. And though she knew she would lose him herself if she succeeded...be condemned forever to an obscure corner of a backwards planet...she also knew just what it would mean for him to be one of _them_. So she landed at just the wrong place at the wrong time...or the right place at the right time, though he never would have agreed...to set the Family on their trail. Forcing her thief to become fully human. No longer the last of his kind, but one more amongst the multitude of mankind; he was at peace in a way she had never seen him before.

Which was...of course...why she should have known it would never last. If she had followed the time stream even just a bit she would have seen its inevitable end. He wasn't, after all, despite what he would have others believe, at all peaceful. Otherwise, he wouldn't have stolen her in the first place. And when trouble caught back up with him... He gave it all up. Reluctantly, yes, but willingly all the same.

There were more broken hearts. Not just his but the woman's as well.

Again.

Because, being human, she simply couldn't understand what he had done. Couldn't understand the cold use of power and the manipulation of the lives of others. And, most importantly of all, she couldn't have forgiven him even if she had.

Which meant the TARDIS was going to have to take much better care of her thief in the future.


	4. Lioness

There could be no chance of a broken heart, this time. Her poor thief had had quite enough of that sort of thing. So rather than searching through all time and space itself, she simply looked back along his own time stream. Because there'd been something...some_one_... And then she found it.

A promise of friendship. And nothing more.

Only this time, because she really was trying to be very careful with her thief, she searched the stream as far as she could until its thread became lost amidst the tangled possibilities and probabilities of all his other potential futures. But she'd seen enough.

And while she'd seen hope, and a promise of companionship in this path, she _had_ looked far enough to have seen something else. Danger and loss and a pain that would send him reeling off nearly into the void itself. But even then...even in the darkest days she sensed were coming if they followed this stream...hope remained. She couldn't quite see how or why any more than she could see where the danger lay. Yet she knew it was there as certainly as she knew this was the path they had to follow.

It was easy this time. Not as easy as it should have been, because at first they seemed maddeningly unable to reconnect, but still... Relatively easy. Just parking on the exact right street at the exact right time. Easy. For a TARDIS. And she _was_ clever.

Then they were running together... Her thief and the woman whose name sang of his own lost people... The woman with the soul of a lion and the fire of the extraordinary hidden deeply within the ordinary.

Donna Noble.

The _Doctor-_Donna.

Because the TARDIS _was _learning. She'd failed, yes, but she'd learned from those mistakes. Raw energy was too much for them; it killed rather than transformed. And he would not be changed himself; he couldn't be made to stay still that long. But filtering the power...processing it through him...or a part of him...sparing her the power but giving her the knowledge... The understanding of a Time Lord in the mind of a human.

A human-Time Lord biological meta-crisis.

And it worked.

At first.

Only, even just the knowledge was too much. Far, far too much for a human mind. Even one as strong and as sure as the noble woman's. As the Doctor-Donna's. And, once again, it was her thief who had to fix it...to make it right. To save Donna's mind by taking it all away. Forever losing his best friend...his best mate...in the process.

His grief and his pain were horrible, just as she had foreseen. His loneliness at the loss of her...at the loss of all of them...nearly destroyed him. Sent him reeling off on his own again. And, eventually, it killed him. Nearly killed them both, actually. Because this time, as his old body died and his new was reborn, the storm and the fury caught her, too. Crashing through the sky together, she had mere moments to reach out... To find a safe place for them both.

And she found it.

A presence which burned so brightly... A beacon calling out to the TARDIS herself...calling out to them _both_. Promising peace and safety, a haven to rest and recover. Reaching out desperately, only moments from total destruction, the TARDIS found the most important place in the whole of the Universe...

The TARDIS brought him home to Mother.

And, under the circumstances, crashing through time and space as they were, it wasn't _really_ her fault. She shouldn't be blamed. Because, while they did arrive far, far too early, she _was_ a time machine, after all. She could fix that. And she did.


	5. Still Waters Run

When she finally had a chance to think about it, waiting there in the garden, gathering enough energy to begin restoring her systems, even she had to appreciate the irony of her situation. There she'd been, so pleased with her own cleverness, carefully picking apart the knots of time and space for him, one stream at a time. Yet it wasn't until she'd finally lost control...nearly given up even trying...that the solution had dropped out of the sky in front of her. Well, actually, she'd dropped out of the sky in front of _it_...but it came out to the same thing in the end.

Because the strands which bound her thief to this child were so strong she was almost surprised he couldn't see them himself. And when the girl accepted him in as though this sort of thing were a daily occurrence, the TARDIS almost believed she could, too. Only they'd arrived too early. Little Amelia Pond wasn't ready yet. She wasn't, quite simply, old enough.

This was, fortunately, easy enough for a time machine to fix. Just a quick jump forward and the problem was solved.

And it was all so simple...so _obvious_...in retrospect. The answer could never have been to convert a being who already was...forcing all that power and knowledge into a living, breathing human, attempting to twist them into something they could never, truly, be.

No.

The solution was far, far more elegant than that.

The TARDIS needed to start from the very beginning and insert herself _there_...at the very moment in which life began. Transforming the raw stuff of life itself. Creating a true human Time Lord; all the power and knowledge of the vortex at the core of her being. Just like her precious thief himself.

And it worked. Gloriously. Perfectly. Just as the TARDIS had known it would. Because, of course, she'd already seen the result, though she hadn't been aware of it at the time. The child..._her_ child...all grown up and with a lifetime of running with him behind her. It didn't even matter that he seemed to have lost her there, in the Library... That was his sort of problem, and she trusted he'd find a way to fix that himself. Saving people was, after all, what he _did_.

No, the TARDIS had done her part. She'd found...created?...willed into being?...another like him. So that, even when he traveled by himself, when they spun through the universe together, just her thief in his mad box, he was no longer truly alone. He was connected... he _belonged. _Not just to her child, either. Because it was that tie, so strong that it had called to her even as she'd fallen nearly helpless through the sky. That had pulled her down into a garden in Leadworth. That would continue to call him back, through all of time and space, no matter how far away he roamed.

Because she hadn't just given him a wife...a _mate_...truly fit for him. No. She had given him so much more...a home...and a family. And through that home...through that family... The TARDIS saw so much more than even she had thought possible. Because in giving that piece of herself, in merging herself with them, she had made it possible for _him_ to do so as well.

And so, looking forward, she could see his ancient cot, forgotten for centuries in one of her many cupboards, brought out and dusted off and filled with new life. Not just once, but again and again. Passed down the line from parent to child... Passed down _his_ line...

Her thief would always be the last of the Time Lords of Gallifrey, but he was now something more. Something _infinitely_ more. Because he was one of _them _now, too... Part of the vast multitude of humanity who had held his hearts for such a long, long time.

And from now on, she knew...

He would never stop laughing...even when he cried.


	6. Timey Whimey Epiloguey

He sat in the jump seat by the console. His infant son lay upon his lap, stretched along his thighs, the child's head cradled on his knees, small legs curled against his father's chest. He gazed down at the infant, eyes full of the same awestruck wonder she'd seen directed at star strung galaxies; the child stared back with the fathomless eyes of the newly born.

Her thief and his child.

Her thief and her child's child.

_Her_ child.

Because, suddenly, as she watched them watch each other, she saw it... She _felt_ it...and finally understood. He wasn't the only one who had become a part of _them_...who was no longer alone.

Dancing through the vortex, spinning through time and space...

The TARDIS laughed.

And just exactly as if he had heard it, the Doctor looked up from his son, right into the heart of her, and smiled.


End file.
